We Paid 20% Of Our Employees $25,000 To Quit | Hacker News Reader

We Paid 20% Of Our Employees $25,000 To Quit

blog.shanemac.com

31 pointspetermdenton31 comments

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> Our mission is simple: To create an open and secure messaging network that will last forever.

I’m getting mixed signals; the company name is Ephemera - with “ephemeral”, meaning “lasting a very short time”[1].

[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ephemeral

They publish the app under unshut labs. And the terms and conditioning only give more mixed signals:

> 3. Unshut Labs may terminate your access to the app at any time and for any reason, without notice.

https://converseapp.notion.site/Terms-and-conditions-004036a...

So ephemeral actually refers to your ability to use their app.

It seems like the kind of risk-averse cover-all clause a corporate lawyer would try to shoehorn into an agreement. I don't exactly blame them - many companies were caught with their pants down when AI became mainstream, as they were being crawled for all their data and they had nothing in their ToS that would allow them to stop it.

Presumably the network lasts forever, not necessarily the messages.

Good question.

The protocol XMTP is built to last forever and will outlive us all, the name of the company is a reminder that if the company ever went away that the protocol must be able to live on. Requirement for decentralization.

Not a new idea by the way. Especially in Germany where labor laws are strong and companies are generally less hostile, some try to avoid doing layoffs by offering cash payments for retiring early or quitting. 25k would be considered quite a low offer though (and that is in Germany, where wages are generally much lower and taxes much higher).

As another person down below commented: further down in the post he did mention $25k + an additional $25k per year of tenure!

So it could be a bit more thank just $25k.

Which part of Germany and which companies are these? I have never heard of such arrangements. Even if there were, these payments will get eaten up by taxes and will leave peanuts. Hell, instead of such, I heard more stories of claw-backs(asking for refunds of paid salary because termination date was 7 days before the end of month or more or less…)

>Which part of Germany and which companies are these?

VW currently. AFAIK ZF also announced something similar with their layoffs.

>Even if there were, these payments will get eaten up by taxes and will leave peanuts.

Which is a German problem. The exact same goes for wages. Companies can't set taxes though.

>I heard more stories of claw-backs(asking for refunds of paid salary because termination date was 7 days before the end of month or more or less…)

I think it is unreasonable to expect compensation for time you weren't employed by that company.

The people that take offers like that are the ones that are confident in their ability to quickly line up something else.

Meanwhile the driftwood stays put.

Excellent way to dilute your talent pool.

And they brag about it!

This is a US company… so how is health insurance being handled?

COBRA costs are a couple thousand dollars for families, and even that’s not available to employees who choose to voluntarily quit. Either the CEO is ignorant of the reality or employees will wind up paying a fairly expensive cost for that $25k one-time cashout. I hope they know this.

If I were in the position of wanting to quit like that, I’d ask the employer to sweeten the deal by throwing in 6mo or so of health insurance coverage.

> COBRA costs are a couple thousand dollars for families, and even that’s not available to employees who choose to voluntarily quit.

COBRA is available in the US regardless of the reason for quitting a job. I quit a large company job to try launching my own startup and was using COBRA for family health care. It is not cheap, as you say (my top-of-the-line medical+dental+vision coverage for myself, my wife and the kids was ~$2500/month), but the option is certainly there.

But I think the main approach to this type of voluntary severance bonus is for people to move to another employer, not to the unemployment. I know a few people who took such offers and they all quickly pre-arranged their next step before signing buyout offers. In fact this is one of the big problems with buyouts at large corps: the people taking buyouts first are good engineers that can find jobs anytime and this is the group the companies want to keep. My 2c.

Thanks for asking, agree health insurance costs in the US are high and a real concern. We fully cover the costs of health care (medical, dental and vision) premiums for our US employees and their dependents, so they don't pay a dollar towards coverage while employed. Additionally, for those who opted to take this offer, we did include COBRA coverage to help offset those costs for them as well.

I wonder if this is related to their recent acquisition:

https://paragraph.xyz/@ephemera/converse

Presumably some of the newly acquired employees don't share the same goals or ideals, or are entirely redundant. Offering bonuses for voluntary resignations relieves some of the pressure with onboarding, trying to find new positions, or a morale-sapping layoff.

I posted this as a reply, but to a dead comment so it got lost.

Telegram also kinda tried something like this with the TON blockchain, and more recently with Mini Apps. It’s even quite easy to make TON payments with their telegram wallet. Buuuut they recently launched Telegram Stars, a more traditional non-blockchain premium currency, and their terms of service are that all payments for digital goods must be through stars (so not cryptocurrencies), because this allows them to give Apple and Google a cut, to not break the App Store/Play Store rules about digital goods/services.

So I imagine this messenger would run into similar problems: if you want to be on the apps stores, they probably can’t use cryptocurrencies, because Apple and Google want their 30%

Also known as "voluntary redundancy".

Although I'm sure it sounds a lot more hip and start-up-y to avoid the "r" word.

Exactly what I thought

The post presents this like it's a novel and noble idea. Yet, nowhere does it mention the term severance(or redundancy pay). I guess I should applaud them for voluntarily following what would just be standard labor laws in some places?

I think i'd need more than 25K to quit a job.

further down in the post he did mention $25k + an additional $25k per year of tenure!

If the option was being made redundant and receiving $0, what would you do?

At least in 2024. 4 years ago it would have worked out in your favor unless you REALLY like that particular company.

You mean redundancy pay. Why sugar coat it.

Is this satire?

This is what investors put up with, in today's market.

I guess it’s actually what they want?

Like this:

> We are a team working on the world's most challenging, ambitious, and technical problems.

No, you’re working on a messaging service, not the cure for cancer.

> Building the world's most secure and decentralized messaging app

Uh huh, cool, let's look at that app's terms and conditions agreement:

> 3. Unshut Labs may terminate your access to the app at any time and for any reason, without notice.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think thats what we in the bussiness call "not decentralized". This whole startup seems like a sham, and 25k being low makes a lot of sense.

Receipts: https://converseapp.notion.site/Terms-and-conditions-004036a...

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